5 Homes Featured With Bomb Shelters (Mind. Blown.)

“This spacious 6192 square foot single family home has 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms, oh and by the way, a bomb shelter too!”

No matter how innocuous a real estate agent might be, featuring a bomb shelter as a selling point can take some finesse and subtly, or ‘spin’ as we like to say in marketing.

With searches on Google currently trending for “bomb shelters near me” we thought we’d take a look at a few properties listed on Homes.com and compare descriptives, qualifiers, and superlatives, while offering some advice to agents and home sellers on the best way to market your home to both preppers and non-preppers alike!

Let’s start by saying, we hope you (or we) never have to need one, but shelters do have a history in the US due to post-World War and Cold War fears, and US government recommendations to be prepared for anything.

The most stunning home featured for sale is in Connecticut, and boasts almost “7 acres of lushly landscaped grounds”, a pool house, tennis courts, and a “bomb shelter… which can be turned into a wine cellar,” potentially for housing this vintage of wine, reported to be of the explosive grape back in 2014.
This really is a ‘wow’ home, so you can probably forgive the listing agent for not including a few tastefully shot photos of the “potential wine cellar”.

Our most expensive home with a little extra protection hails from California (a state with a significant security interest noted in Google trends), nestled just north-west of Los Angeles the farmhouse and surrounding 12 acres offer the perfect getaway from civilization and a somewhat unattractive escape bunker for those less discriminating Angelenos looking for a some security over aesthetics.
The listing description is a smorgasbord of superlatives; “Oozes charm! “Sweeping views! “Ideal spot for horses!” “Ample water supply!” and “Many possibilities…opportunity knocks!” – We’d recommend painting the cement to be a little more persuasive.

In case the East & West coasts aren’t your cup of tea, welcome to a lovely spot in Kimball, Michigan, a little ways outside of Detroit in the shadow of Lake Huron. The listing agents in the Mid-West are obviously a little less concerned with a potential buyers ‘shelter remorse,’ with this particular property noting simply, “greehouse with bomb shelter,” as if gardening & bomb disposal might go hand-in-hand.
The listing also mentions that “or use it for relatives when they visit” which might refer to the second chalet or I’ll leave it to the imagination of the more creative of you with finicky in-laws. Ahem.

Our next featured property with a little extra cement reinforcement hails from Indianapolis and bristles with superlatives, descriptives, and many other -ives. It’s a magnificent 4 bedroom mini-mansion with “a rich history… clearly evident in the design.. and even a bomb shelter in the basement.” I’m assuming the ‘rich history’ is referring to the Cuban Missile Crisis which the builder was prognosticating when building this house in 1959.
Although the listing agent chose not to include a photo of the shelter itself, I included a picture of the pretty awesome wet bar, which, in case of emergency, might be an ideal place to ride out the first or second volley. Might especially be perfect for a Jägerbomb, at least.

For our last everything-included-including-a-bomb-shelter property we return to Michigan, to the lovely town of Macomb, a suburb of Detroit that appears to have avoided that city’s housing woes. This pretty amazing 6 bedroom, 6 bathroom spacious gem lists some amazing details and matter-of-fact features. There is an obvious penchant for yellow and aged woodwork throughout, which may have blinded me to a relevant photo of their bomb shelter (which is probably painted yellow too!)
I can say that this property has the most understated of descriptions of a secure bunker, “jack and jill bath, sunroom in upstairs bedroom, 5 furnaces, 4 air conditioners, bomb shelter, bilco doors to basement,” perhaps leveraging many of the other home’s features to avoid any fallout from its inclusion.

Wherever you may want to call home, and whether a bomb shelter is a nice-to-have or a must-have feature, you’ll find the homes above and many more, on Homes.com.

Grant is the Vice President of Search Marketing for Homes.com. Grant plays a key role in navigating the complexities of the search engine optimization landscape. He has been described as an online marketing strategist, motivator, and idea machine; however, he prefers father, sailor & expat Brit.